I came back today to hear the happy news that OraTweet will soon be available to anyone who wants to give it whirl. Noel is prepping the final package for distribution, but if you’re interested now, head over to oratweet.com and sign up to be notified when it’s ready.

The distribution requires APEX and Oracle DB, natch. APEX is a very active community, and I’m sure people like Chet and Dimitri Gielis will be chomping at the bit to get their hands on it.

I’m really stoked to see OraTweet released into the world for several reasons.

First and foremost, it’s just the “side project turned mission-critical application” story I love. Yes, believe it or not some teams here other than ours use micro-blogging for daily operational work. We have lots of internal use cases that Noel plans to share on oratweet.com.

Stories like OraTweet are common, e.g. ESME, a project fostered in the SDN, was launched about the same time OraTweet went live in June of last year.

Some people are surprised that Oracle has a micro-blogging application at all.

If you read here, you know we have a soft spot for internal innovation like Connect, which is integrated with OraTweet today. We have big plans to build out a tighter integration that will link OraTweet and Connect groups, allowing people to interact with Connect directly from OraTweet and vice versa from email, SMS and IM.

This innovation has begun to bubble up publicly, and I’m happy for Noel.

I’m also selfishly hoping that Connect will someday go the same route. Not gonna lie.

There are other reasons I’m stoked, too.

The logo Rich designed is the default avatar that Noel is using, and OraTweet’s API was built by the late, great Carl Backstrom.

You may recall Carl’s untimely departure back in October. Carl loved APEX and saw the value in Noel’s work. Being the APEX evangelist he was, he immediately signed up to help Noel build out the vision for OraTweet.

Seeing OraTweet released into the public domain makes me happy for Carl. He would be proud.

Of course, OraTweet will be provided as-is with no support, but I’m sure Noel will keep the code clean. He tells me that he might eventually release the Windows OraTweet application too.

If you want to follow Noel’s progress, you can follow him on Twitter @noelportugal and/or @oratweet.

By the way, you might already know, there’s an Ora_Tweet too, written by Lewis Cunningham. Lewis’ version is a PL/SQL package that tweets directly from the database, very useful for tweeting status updates on processes and monitoring their progress.